Ranking Employees: Why Comparing Workers to Their Peers Can Often Backfire

What inspires an employee to work harder? More money more often than not. But what about being benchmarked against peers asks Wharton management professor Iwan Barankay in a new study titled ”Rankings and Social Tournaments: Evidence from a Field Experiment.” With the help of a ”crowd-sourcing” website Barankay set out to discover not only whether workers are interested in how they rank against their peers but also what happens to their performance if they find out how they placed. His conclusion may leave companies thinking twice about the best way to appraise staff performance.

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